I'm Caramella Mou and this is my cook book. It contains mostly recipes passed down from my Mum or invented by myself. Sometimes I cook from cook books and if I find a recipe really good, I blog about that too.

8 February 2008

Sujuk 2

Last night I made the sujuks. Very exciting and it got a bit late, so I didn't get to blog about it.The whole went faster than I thought it would and it was rather fun too.Here is my sausage stuffing machine, it's my beloved Electrolux Assistent with a new attachment.I'm not sure I needed to soak the intestines. I think that's only needed when they have been stored in brine or salt and that in order to make them more flexible. The sujuk tends to be on the salty side once it's done, after all water and other liquid has evaporated, so getting some of the salt out of the skins is a good thing.

Anyway, the intestine is threaded onto the plastic pipe.I actually had more intestine that would fit onto the pipe, so I had to cut it off. Before I tied the end, I filled the machine up with mince mixture as far as possible to avoid air bubbles. Once the mince started showing at the end of the plastic pipe, I pulled out a little bit of the intestine and tied a string around the end. Then I switched the machine on and started stuffing it with more mince.At approximately 30 cm lenth, I stopped the machine and squeezed the mince away from around the pipe and tied the string around for the second end of the sausage. With a new piece of string I tied the beginning of the next one. After just under an hour, I had eight and a half sausages. The last one was a bit tricky as I ran out of mince and there is just so much I could push down the machine with the plastic stick. So for the last half, I took off the plastic pipe, took out as much of the mince that I could and stuffed it manually. This was quite tedious and I'm not doing that again.

Lundulph hung our produce on the wine rack in the fridge:Almost immediately the sujuks started dripping, so we've lined with kitchen tissues and we swapped them tonight. There will be more of this over the next couple of days. Hopefully the fridge will be sufficient to get them dried.

They do have a strong smell though. It's not unpleasant, but too much of anything is not good, so I'll have to get hold of something to neutralise it with next time.

My mixture of mince was 75% extra lean beef and 25% lamb. Basically what I happened to have in the freezer. Generally pork is mostly recommended, but it's not that important.

Also if you can't get hold of any kind of sausage skins, or just feel it's too disgusting, cheese cloth can be used as well instead. Just form the mince into a long sausage and roll it up into a piece of cheese cloth, so that it covers it with a couple of layers.

Once we'd put the sujuks in the fridge, some of them kept sliding out of the string knots. I'm not sure how to tie them to prevent this. Must remember to leave more bits of the intestine at each end next time. Yesterday I had to re-tie them a couple of times. They are staying put now though.

Finally when I cleaned out the sausage machine, I ended up with a handful more mince. This I flattened into a hamburger shape tonight and fried for Lundulph's dinner. He thought it was excellent and suggested we make this mixture for our next barbecue.

The next big thing to do is on Sunday evening, when I'll take the sujuks out and roll them for the first time. They will shrink as they dry and rolling will push the air out and make the sujuk denser.